Re: Comments on draft-yergeau-rfc2279bis-00.txt

I agree that BOMs should not be encouraged in IETF specs
for UTF-8 use.

Kind regards
Keld


On Wed, Oct 02, 2002 at 02:55:36PM -0700, McDonald, Ira wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I can't find Martin Duerst's suggested revisions but...
> 
> This IETF standard should NOT encourage the use of leading BOM in
> streams of UTF-8 text.  The optional use of leading BOM in UTF-8 (as
> I know Martin said) destroys the crucial property that US-ASCII
> is a perfect subset of UTF-8 and that US-ASCII can pass _without
> harm_ through UTF-8 handling software libraries.
> 
> Specifically, in the printer industry, the optional presence of
> leading BOM in UTF-8 attribute string values sent over-the-wire
> in the Internet Printing Protocol/1.1 (IPP/1.1, RFC 2910)
> has caused bugs, but has _never_ provided any utility.
> 
> The use of detection of leading BOM by software that guesses the
> charset encoding of arbitrary text is pernicious and dangerous.
> 
> UTF-8 never needs a 'byte-order' signature.  The concatenation and
> substring extraction bugs inherent in allowing/encouraging leading
> BOM in UTF-8 are serious issues.
> 
> Cheers,
> - Ira McDonald (co-editor of Printer MIB v2)
>   High North Inc
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Patrik Fältström [mailto:paf@cisco.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, October 02, 2002 5:35 PM
> To: Francois Yergeau
> Cc: ietf-charsets@iana.org; Bert Wijnen
> Subject: Re: Comments on draft-yergeau-rfc2279bis-00.txt
> 
> 
> On Thursday, September 19, 2002, at 06:49 AM, Francois Yergeau wrote:
> 
> > I think I have covered most outstanding comments, with the notable
> > exception of the BOM issue raised by Martin Dürst. This one is neither
> > trivial nor uncontroversial, and I have not seen anything ressembling a
> > consensus, so it remains open (no changes to the draft).
> 
> [2 weeks have passed again, and I have not seen any comments on this 
> list on this]
> 
> If anyone agree with Martin changes and text about the BOM issue _IS_ 
> needed, let me know no later from one week from now (i.e. october 9). 
> If I don't see anyone screaming, I declare consensus for this draft, 
> and I'll take over from here.
> 
>      Thanks to all of you for all help!
> 
>          paf